Wednesday, 19 March 2014

Since my post in January 2012, the American Antiquarian Society has launched its Digital Image Archive, called GIGI with beautifully presented tif-format thumbnails. This is in addition to other stand-alone digital projects and online exhibitions. Of particular interest to ephemerists are the 1415 broadsides (Browse and select broadsides). A keyword search for ephemera yields 3018 results at the time of writing (of 10,000 results from a keyword search in the General Catalogue). There are links from the catalogue into GIGI where appropriate, so the advice to scholars is to start there.

All very exciting for those of us who don't have Readex and want to browse the collections of the AAS. There is advanced searching too within GIGI.

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Search for broadside in GIGI (C) American Antiquarian Society

A list of collections represented includes the following categories of ephemera:
Album cards; Billheads; Broadsides; Christmas cards; Civil War envelopes; Currency; Election Ballots; Invitations; Membership Certificates; Menus; Postcards; Ream Wrappers; Sheet Music; Trade Cards; Valentines; and Watch papers from Graphic Arts, and Trade catalogs from Books. There are also hundreds of prints.

Monday, 17 March 2014

I came across Larry Seidman's superb animated site of moveable cards from the Biedermeier period when I was working on valentines, and am delighted that Larry has accepted my invitation to write a post about the site, which makes inspirational use of technology. The YouTube videos also give wonderful insights into the mechanisms of paper moveables and optical and tin mechanical toys.

All images are (C) Collection of Larry Seidman and are reproduced here with permission

If a picture is worth a thousand words then a gif is worth a thousand
pictures! These animated gifs show the mechanisms behind the hand colored
copper engravings of pull tab movable cards from the Biedermeier period
1815-1835. They were made in Europe primarily in Germany and France and
England. Some are completely hand done in watercolor. Many were given out as
greeting cards or the modern day equivalent of valentine cards.

These
were the predecessors of the well known movable books by Nister and
Meggendorfer. Some of the mechanisms were very elaborate. There are scans
of the reverse sides of the cards which show how the levers activate many
simultaneous moving parts with the pull of one tab. This gives a behind the
scenes look into the mind of the paper engineers from 200 years ago!

A gif is basically a file format that shows animation on the web.
The technique employed is rather labor intensive but provides a nice resolution
to the cards. It gives a cleaner image than in a video.

Individual
scans of the cards are taken sequentially by pulling the tab a little bit more
each time. The technique utilized is similar to the stop-motion of the
old Wallace and Gromit cartoons. The scans are edited and sequenced in
Photoshop and then uploaded into the tumblr blog as a gif file.

I have collected these fragile cards for 25 years and have over 100 in my
collection. I especially like the unique and elaborate mechanisms that
never show up in book form. It is a miracle they have survived! Many have been
restored (by reattaching the broken threads) by Robin Collins, giving new life to
these superb mechanisms. Both she and I will be speaking at the Movable Book Society conference this September in Philadelphia so please come.

For
those interested there are short movies of my collection on YouTube: